Phenax, God of Deception - Comments

[Comment Bot]

Phenax, God of Deception

[Visba]

Hey just want to give you a heads up on the Eater of the Dead + Phenax combo: it can create a poor gameplay experience when you're actually playing because:

1) It creates a situation where either someone has removal, or you just win after 1 turn, EXCEPT
2) The combo is non-deterministic. Because you don't know if you will hit creatures off of your opponents' decks, you literally need to play it out to the very end. Hopefully your opponents will get the idea and just scoop, but there might be one stubborn player who insists on going to the end in hopes that you run out of gas. This can take a long time, it is very sad when you fail, and it is not very satisfying when you succeed because you just spent like 5-10 minutes slowly milling all of your opponents with nothing else happening.

As long as you and your playgroup are okay with these two things you can totally go for it! I personally cut Eater of the Dead from my own Phenax deck because I don't like either of these features, and also because I built mine to be a janky and very ironic sea-monsters tribal deck instead of a typical Phenax build so it was a little bit off flavor.

[GaleCernava]

Yeah i agree on the most part. also i was planning on making it a budget deck anyways, and the price has gone up like crazy on that card. Also the deck should be more of a grind kinda thing, not a lucky combo.

[Visba]

Wow you're not kidding on the price there, when I bought Eater of the Dead 5 years ago it was under $10. It seems to have spiked just before Kamigawa, I wonder if there is some sort of other card or commander in this set that combos with it?

Also if you're trying to keep the deck budget, you might have some trouble with Intruder Alarm, which spiked because it combos with one of the new Kamigawa commanders. Some cards I like to use to untap a key creature are Freed from the Real and Pemmin's Aura. The creature Horseshoe Crab also isn't bad if you have a whole lot of mana.

[GaleCernava]

Well the thing is i already own intruder alarm, so i was giving it some slack in the deck. And it would be so good in this deck.